The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) is not satisfied with the performance of the Chief Commissioners at Large Taxpayer Units (LTUs) and Regional Tax Offices (RTOs) due to low collection of the defaulted amount from the withholding agents in 2009-10.
Sources told Business Recorder here on Monday that the Regional Tax Office (RTO) Faisalabad has identified 2588 withholding agents in its area of jurisdiction whereas defaulted amount detected in current fiscal year stood at only Rs 1.481 million. The Quetta RTO identified 63 withholding agents and the default amount recovered from them stood at Rs 0.016 million.
The RTO Peshawar identified only 24 withholding agents from whom an amount of Rs 10.493 million was recovered. In case of RTO Sialkot enforcement action has been taken against 151 withholding agents, but no default amount was recovered during the period. Sources said that the data clearly talks about weak enforcement action pertaining to withholding agents.
A recent report of the FBR showed that the major thrust of the FBR should be on plugging the loopholes by extensive audit of withholding agents, corporate cases and other potential revenue cases pertaining to sales tax. A concerted and planned effort coupled with a strong will could help the FBR to even achieve this uphill task.
When contacted, tax experts said that the board should conduct income tax audit of withholding agents for which criteria would be devised under the national audit plan. The audit should cover all categories of withholding agents. There are many agents who are not regularly filing statements nor deducting due taxes.
Within the corporate sector, the focus of audit should be withholding agents across the country. In this connection, computerised criteria must be devised for effective audit of such agents under the audit guidelines and audit plan. The audit of withholding agents would include government projects, corporations, organisations and others, the experts added.
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